Speakers

Main speakers

David Claessen, CERES Ens, Paris, FranceDavid is a researcher at the Institut de biologie de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, CNRS-ENS-INSERM UMR8197, in the Research team Eco-evolutionary mathematics (EEM). His work focuses on ecology and evolution of physiologically structured populations, adaptive dynamics of complex ecological systems, agro-ecology : an eco-evolutionary ecological approach to crop epidemics, and evolutionary ecology of marine phytoplankton in simple and complex models.He is also the director of the CERES Ens and co-organiser of the Summer School.

Mick Follows, MIT, MA, USAMick is Associate Professor of Oceanography in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT. He seeks to understand how the interactions of physical, chemical and biological processes modulate the structure and function of marine microbial communities and regulate elemental cycles on the global. He develops and employs idealized theory, numerical simulations and analysis of observed data to identify the relationships of individuals and communities to their environment, connecting cellular-scale processes to global microbial community structure.

In particular, his team has created a marine ecosystem model that, when initialized with many phytoplankton types whose physiological traits have been determined stochastically, results in emergent community structure and biogeography consistent with known distributions of microbes in the global oceans.

A major focus of the current work of the Marine Biogeochemical Modeling group he balongs to is The Darwin Project : An interdisciplinary, inter-deparmental effort at MIT to model marine ecosystems and understand how they are regulated by, and feedback upon, the environment. More...

Michael Ghil, ENS, France and UCLA, USAMichael obtained his Ph.D. from New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Science in 1975. He is a Distinguished Professor of Geosciences (emeritus) at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, past Head of its Geosciences Department (2003–2009) and founder of its Environmental Research and Teaching Institute. He is also a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was Chair of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences (1988–1992) and Director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (1992–2003).

Michael Ghil is a founder of theoretical climate dynamics, as well as of advanced data assimilation methodology. He has applied systematically ideas and methods from nonlinear dynamics to planetary-scale flows, atmospheric and oceanic. He has used these methods to proceed from simple flows with high temporal regularity and spatial symmetry to the observed flows, with their complex behavior in space and time. His studies of climate variability on many time scales have used a full hierarchy of models, from the simplest ‘‘toy’’ models all the way to atmospheric, oceanic and coupled general circulation models. More recently, he has applied ideas and methods from nonlinear and complex dynamics to ecological and economic networks. More...

André de Roos, University of Amsterdam, NetherlandsBack in 1985, André started his research on investigating numerical methods for physiologically structured population models to ultimately allow application of these models to a broad range of ecological and evolutionary problems. It resulted in a technique called The Escalator Boxcar Train (EBT) to analyze interesting problems in structured population dynamics.

Now, his work at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics focuses on the relationship between individual life history, in particular ontogenetic development, and the dynamics of populations and communities. His main tool to address questions about the connection between individual life history and population dynamics is a class of models, known as physiologically structured population models. State concepts are introduced at both the individual and the population level and model formulation is entirely restricted to individual-level, life history processes. The dynamics of the population simply result from keeping book of all individual-level changes.More...

Special topic speakers

Judith Bronstein, University Distinguished Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, The University of Arizona, AZ, USAJudith Bronstein’s lab focuses on the study of interspecific interactions, particularly on the poorly-understood, mutually beneficial ones (mutualisms). Specific conceptual areas of interest include : (i) conflicts of interest between mutualists and their consequences for the maintenance of beneficial outcomes in these interactions ; and (ii) context-dependent outcomes in both mutualisms and antagonisms. Using a combination of field observations and experiments, she is examining how population processes, abiotic conditions, and the community context determine net effects of the interactions for the fitness of each participant species. She is also collaborating on theoretical and empirical investigations of (i) the fragility of mutualism in light of conservation threats and mechanisms of restoring disrupted interactions ; and (ii) the causes and consequences of "cheating" within mutualism. More...

Margaret Evans, LTRR Lab, The University of Arizona, AZ, USAMargaret is a plant population biologist with research focused in two areas : 1) conservation ecology, including the development of general tools for population and range modeling, as well as building knowledge about particular rare species, and 2) evolutionary ecology, including bet hedging, life history evolution, breeding system evolution, and comparative analyses of the evolution of climatic niches. Since starting a joint appointment split between the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, her research focuses on building process-based models to forecast how western U. S. tree species will respond to climate change. This involves the integration of large data sets (Forest Inventory and Analysis, the International Tree Ring Data Bank, and the Botanical Information and Ecology Network) via hierarchical Bayesian statistical models. More...

Gaël Giraud, C.N.R.S. (French national centre for scientific research), Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne, University of Paris, Paris School of Economics, Paris, France.Gaël Giraud is a French economist, specialized in general equilibrium theory, game theory and finance. He is Chief Economist at the Agence Française de Développement, affiliated with University of Paris 1-Sorbonne Economic Center (CES) and associated researcher at Paris School of Economics (PSE). He is also member of the Scientific Committee of the “Laboratoire d’Excellence” devoted to financial regulation (LabEx ReFi) and member of the Steering Committee on the Energy Shift within the French government and of the Research team “Riskergy" (M. Lepetit) on Energy resilience and sovereign debt. He holds the chair “Energy and prosperity” supported by Ecole polytechnique, Paris Sorbonne university and Louis Bachelier’s Institute. He is also a member of the European NGO Finance Watch, the Nicolas Hulot Foundation. A former fellow of Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, of ENSAE (Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l’Administration Economique) and of CORE (Center of Operations Research, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium), he earned his Ph.D. at the Laboratoire d’Econométrie de l’Ecole Polytechnique in 1998. In 2009, he was nominated as Best French young economist by Le Monde/Le Cercle des économistes. More...

Benoit Hazard, EHESS, Paris, FranceBenoit is an Anthropologist, researcher at CNRS (CR1) and is based at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) Paris. After a generation of research on african migration in Southern Italy, he has undertaken a new research on the future of pastoral landscapes in the anthropocene by focusing on interaction between pastoralism, conservation and large scale investment in rangeland of Kenya. The social change occurring in the central rift valley is captured through the ethnography of resilience, adaptation and resistance of the margins to their inclusion in the global economy. This ethnography allow to discuss the bio cultural frontiers of pastoralism in the anthropocene by looking at how the natural resources (water, pastures, forest) on which pastoralist depend are impacted by conservation project as well as large scale investment in the rangeland such as geothermal project. More (French)...

Eric Malézieux, CIRAD, Montpellier, FranceEric is Director and Agronomist in the Agroecological functioning and Performances of horticultural systems (UPR HortSys) reasearch unit, at the French agricultural research and international cooperation organization (CIRAD). His latest work focuses on the funtioning of complex cultural systems in the humid intertropical zone (sub-saharan Africa, the Caribbean, central America). He is particularly interested in biological regulations in tropical cultural systems.

Albert Moukheiber, C.N.R.S., Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, Paris. Albert holds a PhD in cognitive neurosciences and is a clinic psychologist at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière. His thesis work focused on the social anxiety, gaze avoidance, and the fear of blushing. More...

Magali Reghezza-Zitt, ENS-Paris, FranceMagali is an assistant-professor at the Department of Geography at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Her work focuses on understanding risks and urban vulnerability, especially in environments subject to natural risks such as floods (e.g. Paris). It extended to the concept of resilience in cities in a globalised world, and to the understanding of resilience and adaptation of populations facing catastrophes.More...

Samuel Rufat, Université de Cergy-Pontoise, FranceSamuel is an assistant-professor at the Department of Geography at the Université de Cergy-Pontoise. His work focuses on urban vulnerability and resilience, with a recent research on the dynamics of post-socialist metropolises, notably Bucharest (Romania). He also uses the resilience concept in order to think the adaptation of metropolises and regions confronted to crises and disasters.

He contributed to the structuring of a new field by analysing the practices and spatial representation of video games players. In that frame, he created the junior lab on Video Games at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (2008-2012), and directed one axis of the ANR Ludespace project (2011-2014). More...

Elisa Thébault, iEES-Paris, UPMC, Paris, FranceElisa Thébault studies ecological modeling : impact of biodiversity loss on ecosystem functioning, trophic and mutualistic interactions in complex networks, effects of land use and climate change on soil food webs and related ecosystem services, effects of fishing on marine food webs ; and the analysis of ecological network topology : pollination and herbivore networks, soil food webs, marine and lake food webs. Dr. Thebault is trained in theoretical ecology, and one of her main research interest concerns how diversity and interactions between species influence community properties, stability and ecosystem functioning, both in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Her work on the links between diversity and stability has shown that biodiversity can provide an insurance against environmental disruptions and thus promote the stability of ecosystems. In particular, she has shown that the diversity-stability relationship depends on the strength of trophic interactions and its trade-off with diversity, as well as on the type of interactions between species and on the structure of ecological interaction networks. Her work has been published in 12 articles in journals of rank A, as well as in one book chapter. More...

Frédéric Worms, ENS-Paris, FranceFrédéric is the director of the Centre international d’étude de la philosophie française contemporaine (CIEPFC) at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and a professor of modern and contemporary philosophy history. A specialist of Henri Bergson, he is the co-author with Philippe Soulez of a commanding biography on the philosopher.